1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to IT migrations. Specifically, the present invention provides a tool that consolidates and coordinates the scheduling of IT migrations.
2. Related Art
As Information Technology (IT) continues to advance, many organizations are faced with the task of migrating their existing computer infrastructures, telephone systems and the like to newer technology. For example, an organization might wish to migrate its networking functions from token ring to Ethernet. Similarly, an organization might wish to migrate its telephone service from landline-based service to voice-over-IP service.
An IT migration cannot only involve adding components such as hardware or software, but it can also involve the physical relocation of existing devices and/or components. To this extent, there is often the need to provide precise scheduling of the activities involved with the IT migration. That is, the owners of the devices need to know when they need to take certain actions, and the project staff that is performing or assisting with the migration needs to be scheduled by the project management team. The schedule can be arranged beforehand by making appointments with each individual owner, or the schedule can be more general (e.g., by notifying the owners that their devices will be migrated during a certain time period, such as the morning of a certain day). In the latter case the project team members will have the latitude to migrate devices as they are encountered, within the limits that have determined ahead of time (e.g., a portion of a particular floor in a building will be migrated during the morning of a certain day).
No matter what form the schedule takes, the project management team needs to match up the available labor resources with the devices to be migrated and develop the migration schedule. Many factors come into play, such as: the type of device being migrated; software that may be running on the device (e.g., the operating system, if the device is a computer); the location of the device; the availability of the owner (if the owner needs to be present for any reason); an available time window for critical devices that have restrictions on their down time; the network connectivity (e.g., which network infrastructure devices in which closet serves the device); environmental conditions (e.g., there may be heavy furniture that is blocking a network or telephone port, and movers will need to be scheduled as part of the migration, or there may be modifications required to the workspace to accommodate a new piece of equipment, such as a new monitor); the availability of team members with specific skills needed for particular devices, such as printers or machines running UNIX; etc.
Heretofore, these migration scheduling activities have been done using a plurality of disparate resources such as spreadsheets, calendars, whiteboards, or scheduling programs on PCs. Matching up the resources with thousands of devices can be a daunting task that takes hours of planning and is prone to error. If changes are needed, manual steps may need to be repeated, increasing costs and delaying the schedule. This makes changes unattractive and the schedule rigid.
In view of the foregoing there exists a need for a tool that organizes the information needed to perform the migration, and generates a single, cohesive schedule.